Tuesday, June 26, 2012

TTYU Retro: Past Tense, or Present Tense, or Both?

Recently I read this short piece
about whether it's okay to mix past tense and present tense in your
writing, and my inner linguistics geek stood up and started stomping her
feet, so here I am.

Let me remark something about grammar:

The
effective use of grammar is not about what features of it appear on any
particular page. It is about what the choice of a particular form
allows you to do.

I
hear the phrase "mix past and present tense" and I blink. What does
that mean, "mix"? Does it mean, just write along and don't pay attention
and whichever one comes out is okay? Well, then I'm entirely against
it. On the other hand, I have written an entire novel which uses a
diarist's point of view, and in her diary she discusses things that have
happened to her - in past tense - and things that are going on at the
time when she's writing, including things happening around her and her
assessment of people's current qualities - present tense. In early
drafts I had a couple of readers, confused by the unpolished prose, call
me on "tense-mixing" - but it wasn't tense-mixing, it was just that I
hadn't shown enough of the setting for the current ongoing events part,
and so the proper context for the use of present tense wasn't clear.
Once I properly established that, the problem went away. My use of verb
tenses didn't change at all.

Example from Through This Gate (Dana writing in her diary about trying to figure out her new roommate Shannon):Maybe
mom was hinting that Shannon has some kind of granola-head thing going
and I shouldn't let myself be influenced, but I'm not sure that fits
with the makeup, or the computer either. Anyway, when the last box was
in, Mom looked around my empty half of the room as if she didn't notice
the bare blue mattress or the battered furniture. "This is great," she
said, gesturing - I swear, the woman could conduct orchestras.

There
are a lot of "traditional" past tense narratives out there in the
fiction world. We grow up with them, and because they are the
environment we're steeped in, we've long since stopped finding the use
of past tense remarkable. On the other hand, if you're really paying
attention, I think you'll find that all these past tense narratives also
contain uses of the present tense - you'll certainly find them in
dialogue and direct expressions of a character's thought. I hope you
haven't been thinking that those examples of present tense in a past
tense narrative "don't count." Sure, they count - they are in present
tense precisely because they are doing something different from what the rest of the narrative is doing.
If we were listening to a narrative read aloud, the tense (along with
prosody and dialogue tags) would be a major indicator of when we were
listening to dialogue.

Example from The Once and Future King by T.H. White:Kay looked at his father. He also looked at the Wart and at the sword.Then he handed the sword to the Wart quite quietly.He said, "I am a liar. Wart pulled it out."

We
also shouldn't forget that we change our verb tenses all the time when
we narrate stories verbally. We'll be in the midst of recounting
something that happened and when we get to the crux of it, we'll switch
into present tense to place the listener more inside the moment when
that exciting thing happened.

Example: "I went to talk to my boss about it yesterday, right? So I'm walking in there and I say..."

Honestly,
I'm not sure this one works effectively in written narrative - but I do
think that it is realistic to have such use of verb tenses in dialogue
when one of the characters is engaged in that kind of storytelling.

I've
also seen tense used what I might call "aggressively." The term is an
exaggeration, but what I mean is, the tense gets deliberately changed
for a particular effect. In her book The Handmaid's Tale,
Margaret Atwood begins in present tense, creating a dreamy effect where
there's no sense of the passage of time; then, as the main character's
viewpoint changes, she switches to past tense and suddenly the story
begins to achieve a sense of momentum. It's unusual, but it's
deliberate, and really cool. As for me, when I'm working in alien point
of view, I deliberately choose present tense, and I do it so as to force
the reader to align more thoroughly with my alien's impressions,
emotions, and judgments. I've been told my alien point of view stories
are "challenging, but worth it." The fact is, present tense gives me a
kind of intensity that I can't achieve with past tense.

Example from "Cold Words" (Analog Oct 2009): I
scent human outside the door: our linguist, Parker. He never comes to
the Ice Home while I attend Cold Council - he must bring important
news! I bow to haunches, then excuse myself from Majesty's presence,
quickly as I can without inviting snarls from the others.

So
I guess I'd conclude by saying I don't think it's okay to "mix" present
and past tense - because that implies a lack of care and precision.
It's perfectly all right, however, to challenge yourself and your
narrative, and your reader, and use whatever verb tense you need in
order to serve your own purposes.

2 comments:

How uncanny! I just write a blog post about tense in about 15-30 minutes.

But it wasn't about mixing them, but about how a past tense 1st narrator can still be killed off at the end of the story, regardless of what some writing craft books told you, but it depends on what type of narration you're using, with factors like audience awareness and time...

Oh! And I think Thirteen Reasons Why is a book that's able to use both past and present tense effectively. Although it helps that both narrators keep to their own tense--except near the end, when one of them switches to present tense when she's recording something.